Joshua Schwebel: Solvent

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Joshua Schwebel, "Or Gallery," 2019

Reception for Joshua Schwebel: Solvent March 1, 2019 at 7-9 pm

Joshua Schwebel’s exhibition project is based on his research into the local narratives and contemporary conditions that influence Or Gallery’s sustainability as a space for research and cultural production in Vancouver. The building that is currently home to Or Gallery at 555 Hamilton Street will become both screen and subject for this work that considers the ramifications of leaving the establishment of urban cultural space to the whims of the private real estate sector.

Artist talk with Joshua Schwebel in conversation with Brian McBay Saturday March 2 at 2 pm. Schwebel and McBay will be discussing the constellation of issues that underpin the exhibition, such as the economic conditions of art, and the inherent, enduring presupposition of self-exploitation and precarity in art and cultural work. These ongoing concerns feed into Schwebel’s practice, and were brought to bear on his research and approach to the Or Gallery.

Joshua Schwebel, based in Berlin and Montreal, often initiates site-specific interventions and installations as spatialized and participatory critiques of gallery and museum practices and conditions. Schwebel received an MFA from NSCAD University, and a BFA from Concordia University. His graduating MFA project incited strong reactions when he exhibited the Anna Leonowens Gallery completely empty, without any proof of work to satisfy the degree requirements. His work since then continues to provoke confrontations between the representation and recognition of art, through interventions, futive circulations, withdrawals, and displacements. These actions and their respective forms of documentation indicate points of tension between significance and its construction. Solvent will be his first exhibition in Vancouver.